I learned a new word this month – bioluminescence - ‘The
production and emission of light by a living organism’! I suppose I would have met it before having
seen things like glow-worms (actually beetles) and glowing seas when on the
Isle of Rum possibly caused by dinoflagellates ("fire plants") or,
under rare conditions might be copepods (crustaceans) or a bloom of small
jellyfish. However, a phone call from a
friend asked me if I knew anything about mosses or lichens that might glow in
the dark following on from a query from someone in Grantown. Intrigued, I went on the internet to see if
there was anything obvious and found that there might be something, although
from a species that doesn’t occur in Britain.
In the meantime, more information had been received giving a location
where the mystery glows had been seen so we met up and went to check out the site. The location
 |
| Glowing trees! |
was the old railway line in
Grantown and the trees on site were mainly birches with some aspens and willows
all with good lichen populations which might be the cause of the greenish and
reddish colours seen after dark. Knowing
the location we agreed to meet up again as darkness approached to see if we
could pinpoint the spots on the trees where the “bioluminescence” was
occurring. The colours had been seen by
the person reporting the glows at both dawn and dusk so we had a couple of
options to see what was what. Standing
around on the old railway line, close to houses as it was getting dark made us
feel a little uneasy, particularly as dog walkers and people were passing us
before final darkness! We didn’t have to
wait long and, there above our heads were very distinct red and green colours
appearing on the trees. To get closer we
made our way up the steep railway
 |
| A closer view of one of the 'spots' |
embankment but then had difficulty in
pinpointing the tiny spots of light on the twigs and branches. However, becoming a little elevated above the
railway line allowed us to see over the other embankment where we could see a
house was also covered in red and green spots as was much of its rhododendron
bush. Then the penny dropped and we had
a little laugh – laser-lights – emanating in all directions, several of which
were creating colourful spots on the trackside trees. The query about the colourful spots had been
genuine but the possibility of describing something that might be new to
science faded just as quickly as the last of the daylight! Amazingly, a few days later I had an email
from another friend who lives quite close to the railway line asking if I knew
of any ‘organism’ that glows in the dark!
This unusual outing though did have a real bonus. I’d gone into Grantown mid-afternoon to visit
the Old Spey Bridge area where up to 14 hawfinches had been reported several
days earlier, but a circuit covering both Spey riverbanks and bridges where the
food-plant bird cherry was present, failed to find anything. With a little time still to spare before
darkness I wandered down river to where the hawfinches had been seen originally
and was entertained for a while with passing long-tailed tits,
 |
| The first sighting of the hawfinch |
great tits and
blue tits and a pair of goldeneye on the river.
Most of the seeds on the bird cherries had gone but right at the top of
the bank I spotted a bulky bird in one of the bird cherry bushes and through my
binoculars I could see it was a hawfinch, still managing to find a few seeds on
the bush. There was snow on the ground
and the temperature was around zero so I assumed it was just filling itself up
with any food it could find before it followed the tit flocks off to
roost. It then left the cherry bush and
landed in a very dense hawthorn bush where again I could see it was finding
berries. It was getting a little darker
and it was difficult to keep tabs on the bird and having thought I saw it fly
off to the left I thought that was it for the day. Stopping by the fisherman’s hut to spend a
penny I heard
 |
| and the close up view |
some fairly unusual high-pitched calls close by and with luck the
calls lead me back to the bird which was now feeding on rowan berries. For once, I was honoured to be watching a
hawfinch low down in a tree and, despite it now being after 4pm, I thought I
would risk a few photos, if only I could find the bird in the gathering
gloom. It carried on feeding for a few
more minutes before once again disappearing into the denser stands of cherry
trees – time to go and check out that bioluminescence! Thankyou Mr Hawfinch.
The big effort this month though has been ongoing work with
those good old aspens. Following on from
the meeting to discuss how to try and get more aspens established I managed to
have meetings with the owners of two local aspens stands, both of which are
important for the lichen populations they support. At both sites, stock fences had been
installed 10-15 years ago with the aim of getting regeneration established, the
next generation of trees to hopefully provide homes for lichens and other dependent
species. A great idea and a project that
had been very positive in its aims, but within the fences very little has
happened, something I was well aware of as I had been visiting the sites to
 |
| One of the fenced aspen plots |
record species. The big problem had been
the fences kept out the sheep but not the deer and though there were lots of
‘suckers’ sitting there, constant nibbling by deer had stopped most from
growing. A lack of follow-up monitoring
also failed to identify and address the problem. The suckers, growing from the underground
aspen roots, has been the way aspens at most sites locally have regenerating
for probably thousands of years because the trees produce very little seed locally
on a regular basis. Hopefully, the new
project being discussed would allow these sites to be re-visited and produce
some funding to allow the fences to be modified to keep out the deer, but this
would require some work by yours truly to map and measure the fence-lines. So, over the last few weeks, strainer post
locations have been GPS-ed, fence lines measured and maps produced for the four
existing plots ready for the next meeting to discuss the possibilities. In addition, one of the owners is also keen
to allow new fences to be installed to get more aspens growing so I just hope
the powers that be are just as enthusiastic and that at long last progress to
establishing new trees at just two of the many aspen stands is made.
The other aspen work has been to continue to visit the trees
surveyed back in 2003 to record the rare mosses (Orthotrichum obtusifolium and
Orthotrichum gymnostomum) and to see the current state of the host trees and
moss populations. On the 2nd
I was down near Laggan and found the single aspen and large Orthotrichum
obtusifolium population still intact. Photos of this moss were shown in the
 |
| Collema furfuraceum lichen |
last blog. The bonus on this outing was finding Collema furfuraceum a strange foliose
lichen with a thin membrane-like thallus, the leafy, tree-hugging part of the
lichen. The next site to be checked, on
the 8th, was over on Deeside, and here the picture wasn’t so
positive. The host tree wasn’t GPS-ed at
the time of the survey so I had to rely on being able to match trees in
photographs with trees on the ground, not so easy at this site because many
aspens had fallen over, possibly via gales.
Eventually I found the single aspen that supported Orthotrichum
obtusifolium but sadly this was one of the trees
 |
| Original photo from 2003 showing aspen/moss tree |
 |
| Repeat photo with the aspen /moss tree on ground bottom right. So many aspens have fallen in this wood that it now looks quite open |
now lying flat on the
ground. It looked like the tree had been
down for 4-5 years but despite this, and the tree now being completely dead,
the moss was still present. However,
this situation was only likely to continue for another couple of years at the
most as the bark, in places, was starting to fall from the trunk. On the way back to the car a tall, Phragmites
type grass caught my eye growing on the verge of the busy A93 Deeside road,
close to Balmoral. It didn’t look like
Phragmites so the only similar grass it could be was wood small-reed (Calamagrostis
epigejos) so a photo was taken of a
 |
| Flower-head wood small-reed |
flower head along with a sample for
checking once home. It was wood
small-reed, in a very unusual location and not just that but the first records
for this plant in this general location was by the famous James W H Trail way
back in 1875. On the 26 July in that
year James Trail found the grass near Invercauld Bridge on the same road and
this site was re-found around 1995. On 27
July 1875 Trail also found the grass “near Balmoral” and wouldn’t it be nice to
think that my find, some 142 years later, was from the same location. The 2003 moss survey only visited a small
selection of aspen woods so, having now got my eye in for one of the two
mosses, I made a few outings to woods not
 |
| The fallen aspen with the rare moss |
previously visited but so far without
finding any new sites. On 21st
I visited one of the key sites for the mosses in a wood close to Aviemore, the
only site, so far in the UK, where both mosses were found during the earlier survey. This site though was a key location for the
rarer of the two mosses Orthotrichum gymnostomum where it had been found on 9
trees, and quite quickly I found it on two aspens. I was again using photos taken in 2003 as a
guide and it soon became apparent that one of the trees was now on its side
though once again, the moss was still present.
Only one of the aspens supported both mosses but with a tiny population
of O. obtusifolium and from the photos I could see that this tree along with
all the others were still healthy and standing so I decided not to check out
all the populations on all the trees, but to head off to another group of
aspens close by that I knew hadn’t
 |
| The Orthotrichum gymnostomum moss, top dry, bottom wetted |
been surveyed in 2003. Searching each of these new trees for the
smaller, rare mosses in amongst all the other moss cushions took quite a bit of
time and as I was running out of daylight I arrived at one of two large, fallen
aspens. Normally, I wouldn’t have bothered
checking these but recent experiences suggested I shouldn’t ignore them – a
very good decision. I knew from an
earlier visit that one of the trees had a good population of a wee pinhead
lichen (Sclerophora pallida) and as I approached the rot-hole where they grew I
was aware that some of the mosses I was seeing were small even though they were
dry and closed. The view via the
hand-lens really made my day and as my excitement grew I realised that I was
looking at probably the rarer O. gymnostomum.
Both of these mosses are small and of about the same size but once you
have seen them both, and read the
 |
| Close up of the moss leaves showing rolled leaf edges |
book descriptions, you can see that this moss
has slightly curled-in edges to its leaves whereas the other has leaves that appears
much flatter. Because this was a
recording visit I thankfully had the better camera and tripod with me and, as
the sun was setting behind the surrounding trees, I managed
to get decent
photos of the dry moss with closed leaves and then a series of photos as the
leaves opened after they were gently wetted using water from a nearby small
stream. I was happy with the
identification of what I was seeing but once home I sent photos of to Andy who
had carried out the 2003 survey. He was
also 90% confident I had the right species but to be sure I would need to
squash the leaves of the tiny sample I’d brought home and look for “the
microscopic ID feature
 |
| Microscope view of leaf 'papillae' - the twin circles (x1000 oil) |
distinguishing Oo from Og is the number of papillae on
the leaf cells. Oo has 1 per cell, and
Og has 2-3.” Help, this was taking me
into a world I’d never visited but, following his instructions, I could see the
“papillae” in the leaf cells and thankfully there were 2 – a new site for Orthotrichum
gymnostomum a new species find for me.
Papillae are small fleshy projection on a plant leaf, a bit like the
sensory papillae on a human tongue.
The birds have been ‘getting going’ this month due to the
spells of mild weather. There were owls
calling at the start of the month and a return visit to Nairn mid-month found brent
geese still present. Meeting a local
birdwatcher we found out that, at times, they could be found feeding on the
cricket pitch just behind the sea-front.
Our view though came late in the afternoon when about 20 birds landed on
the sea close to the harbour entrance probably flushed from the rocks they were
feeding on
 |
| Nairn brent geese |
 |
| The 'early' curlew |
by folk walking along the beach.
After about 15 minutes they were off again heading inland possible to
roost? Just up the road at the Tulloch
Y-junction 6-10 waxwings were found feeding in juniper bushes dropping down to
the road occasionally to drink from a puddle.
A single curlew in the flooded field down by the Spey at Broomhill was
very early and probably realised so when the weather turned quite frosty for
several days freezing over the pool.
Coat tits, blue tits and robins started singing mid-month and after
attending a meeting in Strathpeffer late in the month I popped into the RSPB Tollie
red kite viewing centre. I got there
just in time for ‘feeding time’ where a platform in front of the building is
primed with food and the kites have to battle it out with lots of
gulls to see
who can grab the most food. A buzzard
appeared which put the gulls off for a while but once it left the gulls were
back in force and within minutes all the food was gone. Sadly, I only had the wee compact camera with
me and it wasn’t the best option to capture the battle between the birds. However, a couple of kites, out of about four
on this visit, perched in nearby trees and weren’t at all bothered by the
comings and goings of visitors.
The second LAFF was a much more serious affair than the
first and was the culmination of several drafts of an article for Field
Mycology written jointly with Paul Smith, bringing together our records of
fungal balls growing on various species of sedges. Paul is the BSBI Vice County Recorder for the
Western Isles and like myself, has been recording these Anthracoidea fungi over
the last few years.
 |
| Carex bigelowii and Anthracoidea bigelowii |
Late in the writing
process we became aware of a series of specimens/records held in the Royal
Botanical Gardens in Edinburgh just in time for inclusion but also,
importantly, showing that records of some species were ahead of our own. In addition, a couple of sedge/smut
combinations were new to the list giving a good list of species for readers of
the article, due for publication late this month, to consider going out to look
for during the coming year. A link to
the article, on-line, is given below.
The LAFF title links to the Kew Lost and Found Fungi Project where a
couple of the species we had found had been listed, and asking folk to keep an
eye open for them. That’s two articles
for journals completed during 2016 and, to go for a hat-trick, another one was
written for the Hardy Orchid Society showing photos and giving a description
for the hybrid orchid found during the annual
 |
| The hybrid orchid |
Flowerfield orchid count. The hybrid is a combination of the small
white orchid (Pseudorchis albida) and the heath spotted orchid (Dactylorhiza
maculata) and going by the wonderful name of x Pseudorhiza bruniana (Brügger)
P.F. Hunt). By producing this write up
it is again hoped that people might just remember to look a little more when in
areas where the two parents are present.
Currently, the hybrid had only been found in two locations prior to the
recent find being recorded from Ullinish Point on the west coast of Skye, last
recorded in 1994, and Stenness on Mainland Orkney, last recorded in 1977, so
any new finds would be most welcome.
Sorry for the delay a wee stonefly took up a bit of time
recently but more about that next month.
All the best
enjoy the read
Stewart and
Janet
James William Helenus Trail (1851-1919)
James W H Trail
Field Mycology paper – scroll down to “Having a LAFF”
Dinoflagellates
Hardy Orchid Society
Badenoch and
Strathspey Conservation Group
Mapmate
recording database
NBN Gateway
Fungal Records
Database of Britain and Ireland (FRDBI)
BSBI –
Botanical Society of the British Isles
Highland
Biological Recording Group (HBRG)
and how to
join HBRG
 |
| Janet's latest tweed cards |
 |
| Hair ice top and the tiny holes created by a fungus from which the ice is exuded in the bottom photo |
 |
| Turnstone Nairn beach |
Photos ©
Stewart Taylor and
